The First World War was an unprecedented catastrophe that shaped our innovative world . Erik Sass is covering the events of the warfare exactly 100 years after they find . This is the 216th installation in the series .
4 January 2025: A Second Christmas At War
On Christmas Eve , 1915 , John Ayscough , a Catholic chaplain with the British Expeditionary Force in France , wrote a missive to his mother which in all probability seize the feelings of many Europeans during the second Christmas of the war :
War Witness
On the other side of the argumentation , Evelyn , Princess Blücher , an Englishwoman married to a German Lord inhabit in Berlin , struck a like note in her diary , with special attention to the burden go forth to womanhood who ’d fall behind husbands and sons and were now have a bun in the oven to grieve in stoical secretiveness :
National Education web
On Christmas Eve , Blücher attended mass at a hospital which she and her husband confirm as patrons , and unsurprisingly found the normally joyous observance a somber affair , to match the inhuman beauty of Nature :
Aussie ~ mob , Flickr//CC BY 2.0
For some masses the link between Christmas and grief was all too direct . On December 15 , 1915 , the British diarist Vera Brittain write after get a line that her fiancé Roland Leighton might not get leave in time to reelect for her birthday on December 29 : “ This is such a wretched War – so abundant in disappointments & postponements & annoyances as well as more howling thing , – that I should scarcely be surprised to hear that everything I was reckon forward to , which temporarily make life deserving survive , is not go to follow off … ” In fact Brittain was contemplate the possibility of marrying Leighton , on the spur of the moment , as she confided later on in her memoir : “ Of naturally it would be what the world would call – or did call before the War – a ‘ foolish ’ marriage . But now that the War seemed likely to be eternal , and the chance of making a ‘ heady ’ wedlock had become , for most people , so very remote , the world was growing more kind . ” On December 27 , 1915 Brittain found out that Leighton had been offend on December 22 and died of his wounds a day later .
Daily Mail
But in the thick of inescapable tragedy , ordinary mass still care to observe the holiday with undaunted cheer . Wherever potential troops ate Christmas dinner or at least receive extra rations ( top , German soldier with a small Christmas Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree in the trenches ; above , British youngster prepare for the vacation ; below , British bluejacket savor a Christmas spread ) and many received gifts from home , however pocket-size – sometimes from perfect unknown . Jack Tarrant , an Australian soldier recentlyevacuatedfrom Gallipoli , call back a primitive Christmas on the Greek island of Lemnos , lighten up by a nowadays from Australia :
WWI Photos
Another Christmas Truce
well still , although the pattern was n’t nearly as widespread as the firstChristmas Trucein 1914 , in many places soldier in the oceanic abyss disobey order forbidding fraternization and once again observed an unofficial ceasefire , allowing both sides to spend the day in peace . One British soldier , E.M. Roberts , wrote abode :
In some places they even socialized with their foe as they had a twelvemonth before , exchange Christmas salutation and presents . Henry Jones , a British subaltern , noted a few day later on : “ We had a very jolly Christmas … In that part of the line there was a cease-fire for a after part of an 60 minutes on Christmas Day , and a number of Englishmen and Germans jumped out and started talking together . A German grant one of our homo a Christmas Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree about two feet high as a memento . ”
One of the most stark verbal description of the 1915 Christmas Day cease-fire was leave by Llewellyn Wyn Griffith , a Welsh soldier stationed near Mametz Wood in Picardy , France , who tell camaraderie fuel by alcohol , observe by the central of gifts as soldier from both sides traded for necessities , and in the end the predictably furious reaction of their superordinate :
As always , one of the most crucial order of magnitude of business organisation during a truce was burying the dead , both out of regard for fallen comrades and to make the environment less putrid for those still alive . Of of course , among pert frontline soldier there was always room for vaporous absurdity . Another British soldier , A. Locket , wrote home :
Non-Christmas Truces
While it ’s tempting to look back on these fleeting moments of human race as testimony to the holiday ’s especial mightiness over men ’s hearts , the tough-minded truth is that intimate ceasefires were a fairly mutual occurrence throughout the war ( though by no means regular or formally acknowledged ) . This was specially unfeigned in “ still ” parts of the line , for example on the southern portion of the Western Front , where the hilly , forested terrain impeded hostilities , and also when both sides found themselves suffering at the hands of a third adversary – Mother Nature . Thus one German soldier , Hermann Baur wrote on December 11 , 1915 :
A Gallic soldier , Louis Barthas , leave a book of what may have been the same brush , viewed from the other side :
First World War Hidden History
As noted above , cozy cease-fire were also shout throughout the yr to allow inhumation parties to embark into No Man ’s Land . Maximilian Reiter , an Austrian military officer serving on the Italian front , write in the capitulation of 1915 :
No Truce with Nature
As some of these letters and diary entry indicate , soldiers once again confront miserable conditions in the trenches during the dip of 1915 , as they had a year before , and things were only going to get bad with the comer of winter , heralded by cold rain giving way to coke . One of the most mutual complaints on the Western Front , and specially in the low - lying area of Flanders , was the omnipresent mud , which was often describe as unusually embarrassing , with a consistency “ like glue . ” On December 4 , 1915 , a British military officer , Lionel Crouch , was force to set out a message to his don with an apology for the state of the letter of the alphabet :
Another British soldier , Stanley Spencer , recalled one particularly sloppy eve in the soppy surrender of 1915 :
As the time of year wore on , the plunging temperature was an especially heavy visitation for compound troops who hailed from warm tropical climates . A Senegalese soldier appoint Ndiaga Niang , who help in the French expeditionary force in Salonika in northern Greece , recall almost losing his foot to the brutal coldness :
add to these innate miseries was the rubble of war , including unburied bodies but also all style of more prosaic refuse , from empty food for thought container and feces casually put away over the side of the trench to huge mounds of busted or vacate equipment , which no one could dispose of safely due to foeman fervor . J.H.M. Staniforth , an officer in the 16thIrish Division , painted a disgusting picture of their environment in a letter home written December 29 , 1915 :
rick his gaze inwards , in the same letter Staniforth went on to depict the psychological impact from constant exposure to random incidents of horrifying violence , which needs gave rise to a strange nonchalance :
This emotional atrophy was complemented by a whole range of a function of physical ailments – including typhus , transmitted by omnipresent louse ; cholera and dysentery , spread out by polluted water , which could often provefatal ; lockjaw ; bronchitis ; jaundice ; scurvy and other nutritional deficiency ; “ trench foot , ” resulting from standing in cold water system for extended periods of clock time ; “ trench fever , ” a bacterial disease spread by lice first reported in July 1915 ; “ trench nephritis , ” an kindling of the kidneys , sometimes impute to hantavirus ; and frostbite .
Lice proved to be the bane of soldiers ’ existence in the trenches , as they were almost impossible to get disembarrass of until the soldier go on leave , when they were required to bathe with medicated max . Barthas wrote in November 1915 :
With ten of grand of soldiers going on parting every month , controlling biting louse became an industrial operation . An Alsatian soldier in the German Army , Dominik Richert , recounted visiting a delousing station on the Eastern Front in late 1915 :
Killing lice was n’t just a affair of comfort ; as transmitter for typhus they threatened to countermine the war attempt by spreading disease in the civilian universe behind the front , disenable factory and agricultural workers . They were also a constant threat in prisoner of warfare camps . Hereward Price , a Briton who became a naturalise German citizen , contend in the army and was finally get prisoner on the Eastern Front , call in the terrific feast of typhus fever in a Russian prison house ingroup :
While vaccines were available for some diseases , the bother involved with primitive aggregative inoculation method could seem even worse than the disease itself . An Irish soldier in the British Army , Edward Roe , recalled receiving an anti - tetanus pellet after getting wounded in May 1915 :
Finally , there were other , less serious conditions which even so result in numerous hospital sojourn , reduce the in effect work force of all the combatants . Although there are few mentions of it in letters or diaries for obvious reasons , sexually transmitted disease was banal , with 112,259 British soldier treated for various ailments including syphilis , chlamydia and gonorrhoea in 1915 - 1916 alone , and around one million cases of gonorrhea and syphilis in the French Army up the final stage of 1917 . Meanwhile the German Army recorded a amount of 296,503 cases of syphilis over the track of the war .
Private Robert Lord Crawford , a Lord who volunteer as a aesculapian orderly on the Western Front , lamented the spread of another seemingly minor affliction with major upshot – scabies . Though easily cure , he noted that it was often left untreated : “ It is a execrable infliction vibrate one to merriment , then irritating to the point of torment and finally , if unchecked , scabies will foreclose sleep , wound digestion , put down humour and finally set ashore the victim in a lunatic refuge . Madness indeed is the ultimate outcome of this disease . ”
See theprevious installmentorall entree .
